Old Acer and Windows 8 questions

labp04

Hi, please don't shout at me if these queries have been raised here before - I've looked through the forum and found not a lot.

In short, I decided to upgrade my old, but functioning well, Acer Aspire 1522 from XP to Windows 8 which went well except that it will now not connect wirelessly nor will it play dvds (cds are fine).

I've searched ms support and found nothing which has helped/worked and have contacted Acer "support" who said, "those are fairly easy to correct" but wouldn't tell me how preferring to try to extort £40 for each issue with a 3 day (yep, 3 day!) warranty or £100+ for each issue with a 12 months warranty.

Has anyone else experienced and overcome either of these issues? Any advice, guidance thoughts'd be gratefully received.

Iain_L

I did read somewhere yesterday that MS had to remove from Win 8 the ability to play DVDs. Can't confirm this, but it would maybe explain what you have observed. It may be worth downloading something like VideoLAN to try. You can find it here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

As for the wireless issue, perhaps a driver update required?

Iain

Nicholas-bloody-Parsons

Yes MS removed the ability to play DVDs on the box version. You may need to upgrade to the media center version to play DVDs.

MS upgrade information

Alternatives clearly listed here

Although according to the acer support site, you have a licence for Cyberlink Power-DVD, so you could use that, if you still have the install disk.


As above, for the wireless issue, perhaps a driver update required... or supply more information.

prowla

You could upgrade it to Windows 7.

Gyro

You could maybe try installing the original wireless adaptor that came with the machine, as Win8 will have installed its own generic drivers.

You may have the original drivers on a 'tools' cd that was in the box or you could probably get them from the Acer website under 'Support', though you may have to look under 'legacy' or something as it was about 2005 I think.

You could try it with the DVD driver as well perhaps. Worth a try anyway?

p.s. I'm also running Win8 on an oldish Acer but installed 'Start8' and 'ModernMix' from Stardock. Only about 3 quid each but makes all the difference if you don't like that Metro horror.

Start8 makes it look just like Win7 (with Start button), and ModernMix makes those full-page metro windows resizable like a normal window. - and you can easily exit them rather than leave them running in the background.

http://www.stardock.com/products/?from=nav

Lum

StartIsBack is a much better alternative to Start8, cheaper and you aren't giving your money to a CEO who enjoys sexual harassment.

Anyway, as for your problems:

DVD playback: Use VideoLAN.
For your wireless adaptor, chances are Acer aren't going to help so we need to find out exactly who makes it.

Start up Computer Management, go to device manager, find the wireless adaptor, it will probably have a big red X on it, right click it -> properties -> details, and on the Property drop down select Hardware IDs. Post the most detailed looking entry form there (though I'm mainly interested in the VEN_ and DEV_ numbers) and someone here will be able to find it.

labp04

Thanks for the replies - and sorry for taking so long to get back! I've just got back on-line after, what, a week or so with no machine.

In short (and this may serve as a "warning" for some others?), it turned out that my old laptop whilst seeming to meet the specs required for W8 was following a pattern seen by local techies eg seemingly random problems being thrown up on old technology after being "up-graded" to this OS. In my case, and more specifically, the wireless card manufacturer had long gone out of business and despite extensive searches by me and the local folks only best guess/old type drivers were available and, following installation, connection was still not possible. With regards to playing DVDs, not even installing and using an external DVD player would cure this problem.

Soooooh, being faced with either buying a new machine (the thought of which I didnt fancy given that this one up to the time of installing W8 had always worked flawlessly) or re-installing XP, yep, I decided to re-install XP and the machine is now, once again, working well and seems to be back to where it was prior to its little adventure with W8! Who knows, given the apparent world wide, large scale usage of XP maybe, just maybe, Microsoft wont stop their support for the system next year.

Moral? Well, it seems to be that if you want to run "modern" software, then this is probably best done on "modern" hardware. Oh aye, and at least I now have a copy of W8 Pro stored in a drawer for use at some stage in the future!

Again thanks

prowla

Lum wrote: »

StartIsBack is a much better alternative to Start8, cheaper and you aren't giving your money to a CEO who enjoys sexual harassment.

In what way is StartIsBack much better than Start8?

I prefer StartMenuReviver of the ones I've seen so far.

But they're both like putting lipstick on a chicken.

Lum

I've not tried that one, but the main reason I like StartIsBack is that it actually uses Microsoft code.

The vast majority of the Windows 7 start menu code is still buried inside explorer.exe as it's also used to support taskbar jump lists. Microsoft can't really remove it.

The author dug around, found all this and implemented only the missing bits. The result is the closest to the Windows 7 version you're likely to get whereas Start8 and Classic Shell are written from scratch and so very hard to get it exactly the same.